The End of AI: The Movie

MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD!!! If you haven’t seen Steven Spielberg/Stanley Kubrick’s AI, do NOT read any further. (Also, Rosebud is a sled.)

I volunteered for the 6:45AM shift staffing the phones at the local public radio fund driver this morning and got to talking with the station’s technical infrastructure manager about movies ‘n such. (Yes, it was a slow day in the fund drive. So call and contribute already! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!) I was reminded of my cousin-in-law Mark Dionne’s explanation of the ending of the movie AI.

I had assumed that the end was a Spielbergian moving-but-vapid paean to the power of love: The robot boy has become human and can’t rest until his absent Mommy requites his love. Yeah yeah, I thought, sad but uplifting.

About a year ago, Mark told me a different interpretation that made much more sense. Mark is a topnotch software engineer. He saw the ending as saying not that the robot boy had learned to love but just the opposite: the robot was programmed to continue until he heard the “I love you” from his motherly unit. All those thousands of years he was stuck in a loop. No love. Just an unfulfilled conditional. When Mark said this, the ending became much more cynical and much more satsifying to me.

Note: “Love Is Just an Unfulfilled Conditional” ^TM; is soon to be a major song from Garth Brooks. On the B side: “Our Love Is So Sub-Routine that I Can’t Function.” To be followed by “There’s a Method to Your Madness (You’re in a Class by Yourself).”

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